Themes & Theme Settings
There are lots of great themes out there, many of them are free. However, I don’t
generally recommend free themes, and here's why:
• They may not get updated.
• Some might include malicious code.
• A number of them contain footer links back to the creator’s website (or any
website they choose), which is really bad for SEO.
• They could be poorly written, and therefore slow to load.
There is one free theme that seems to have a huge following though, and is
therefore updated regularly. It’s called Atahualpa.
http://wordpress.org/themes/atahualpa
If you want to go down the free route, this is a good one to choose.
I have two recommended commercial themes for WordPress:
1. Genesis
2. Thesis
Both of these can be found at http://ezseonews.com/wpseo
Both of these are 'frameworks'. Essentially a framework powers your WordPress
site, and you change the appearance of your site by installing child themes, or
skins that work with the framework.
Both Genesis and Thesis are excellent choices, though it has to be said that there
is more of a learning curve with Thesis. For this reason, I recommend Genesis
to my own students, and use it on all of my own sites. It’s highly customizable,
there are lots of child themes to choose from, and I can completely control the
duplication issues that WordPress causes (see chapter one if you need to recap).
If you want to use a different theme, here is a five point checklist to help you
decide:
1. Theme is fast loading.
2. Theme allows you to control how posts appear on all of the six
'potential duplication areas' of your site that we looked at earlier. You
should have the options of full post, excerpt, or just the title.
3. Theme has at least one sidebar.
4. Theme allows one (or two) menus at the top of the website.
5. The theme does not include any mandatory links or attributions in
the footer.
Points 2-5 can be answered by the theme's support desk. What about the first
point though? How can you tell the load speed of a website, and check for
potential problems with a template? You'll be pleased to know that this can be
done quickly and simply.
For this we can use a free service at GTMetrix.com
GTMetrix allows you to analyse the page load times of any web page you want.
Find a site that uses the theme you are interested in using, and enter the URL of
that site into GTMetrix. This tool then breaks down the page load speed into
elements, and tells you exactly how long each element takes to load.
First the summary:
The summary gives you an A, B, or C rating of the page speed. You also get to
see the page load time in seconds, the total page size, and the number of requests
that were needed to download the page.
You should be looking for A or B ratings.
Under the main summary are 4 tabs: Page Speed, YSlow, Timeline, and History.
The Page Speed and YSlow tabs offer advice on how to speed up the website.
Click on any entry in these tables for an expanded view that shows you
specifically what you need to do to fix an issue.
The timeline tab offers an interesting view of the page load speed. It tells you
exactly how long each element on the page took to load. This is where you can
get information on any 'theme-specific' problems.
On the right hand side you can see the times taken to load each element. The
timings are in milliseconds (1000ms equals one second).
On the left hand side you get a list of the page elements. If you move your
mouse over an element, it will expand to show you the full URL of that
component. For example, the element below took over half a second to load:
When I place my mouse over the element to check what it is, I see this:
In this case, it tells me that the element is related to the theme.
By looking for slow loading elements on the page, and checking whether they
are related to the theme you want to use, you can make judgments on the how
well that theme is optimized.
TIP: You will find that a lot of the slower loading elements on a page are
images. Some images are related to the theme, whereas others are not – they are
merely images added to a post. Don’t worry about any slow loading image if it
is not part of the theme.
Also, look for any element that has a large file size as these take longer to
download. Here are a few in the theme I am testing:
The images of the demo theme are 1024 pixels by 485 pixels on their server. So
the theme needs large images if you want to use its Slideshow feature. This
means you will have physically large image files as well, although you could
most probably reduce their size in KB using various techniques.
NOTE: If you use the Chrome Browser, you can install an extension called
'PageSpeed' (by Google). This will give you a measurement of how fast the site
loads. Anything over 85 is considered a good score.
Here is the PageSpeed score for the same theme demo site shown in the
GTMetrix example above:
One final thing to be mindful of is that it's unlikely the demo sites set up by
theme vendors use caching plugins, or a content delivery network (CDN). That
means the speeds you see with tools like this will probably be faster once it is
setup on your server and properly optimized. With this in mind, don’t
concentrate too much on the page load times reported, and instead, look for large
files that the theme uses, as these may cause speed problems on any server.
Hopefully you have seen that choosing a theme is not just as simple as finding
one that looks good and using it. You need to make sure it will load fast too, and
not contribute to longer loading times, especially if you go with cheaper, shared
hosting.
For the rest of this book, I am going to be using the Genesis theme framework
for most examples. If you haven’t chosen a theme yet, or want my
recommendation, go with the Genesis framework, and choose one of the child
themes that you like.
If you are already using a different theme, don’t worry, you can still follow along
with all of the SEO advice given in this book.
Installing a Genesis Child Theme
This is a three step process:
1. Install the Genesis Framework.
2. Install the child theme.
3. Activate the child theme.
That’s all there is to it.
The Genesis framework is needed by the child theme, so needs to remain
installed on your server.
Once you have your child theme installed and activated, I recommend you
uninstall all other themes that may be in your WordPress Dashboard. The
reason for this is that old themes can often be routes taken by hackers to gain
access to your site. We really don’t want to give them that chance! So delete all
themes (and plugins), that you are not using.
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